7 Video Presentations From The WindyCityRails 2009 Conference

The 1-day WindyCityRails conference happened again this year, this time in downtown Chicago at the Westin Hotel on September 12. Reviews were generally positive with the conference sessions balancing immediately-useful Ruby and Rails tips with related concepts like functional programming and design. All of the main track sessions were professionally recorded and are available through the official website, though I've linked to each of them individually below as well:

Comics Is Hard: On Domains and Databasesby Ben Scofield – Modeling certain domains with relational data stores breaks down quickly. Ben described two and briefly discussed SQL-less alternatives that work better.

UI Fundamentals for Programmersby Ryan Singer – Ryan advocated "designing first" when building applications and offered examples of design principles in action from his work at 37Signals.

Rails 3 Updateby Yehuda Katz – Yehuda’s session was last. He discussed framework design in a general and how the Rails core team has addressed keeping Rails 3 easy to learn while adding new features. New features were discussed in brief and Yehuda mentioned that an alpha version of Rails 3 may be available in October.

One of the nice things about conferences is getting to meet some prominent figures in the community, and WindyCityRails was no exception! Thanks to the organizers for a solid event. For more conference coverage check my blog post.